'Rockefeller kidnapping': From the tip off to the FBI rescue

The tip to the FBI came in from a neighbour on Thursday. A balding middle-aged
man and young blonde girl who looked very much like the fugitive Clark
Rockefeller and his abducted seven-year-old daughter Reigh were staying in a
downtown Baltimore apartment near the marina.

Clark Rockefeller has been arrested after spending almost a week on the run with his daughter Reigh, who was visiting him in the USPhoto: BOSTON PD / AP

By Philip Sherwell and Beverly Ford in Boston

1:55AM BST 03 Aug 2008

FBI agents and Baltimore police established that they were indeed the missing pair - and that Rockefeller had a 26-ft catamaran docked in the marina. After a two-day stake out, law enforcement swooped last night.

They wanted to separate father and daughter to avoid the risks of a dangerous stand-off so Rockefeller was lured outside by a phone calling telling him the vessel was taking on water. Agents arrested him and then rescued Reigh, safe and unharmed, from the rented flat.

In Boston, veteran detective Thomas Lee broke the happy news to Sandra Boss, Reigh's mother and Rockefeller's former wife. "It was one of the best moments in my police career to tell her we found her daughter," he said. "She collapsed in my arms."

Miss Boss, 41, a high-flying management consultant who moved to London with Reigh last December after the divorce, was due to fly to Baltimore to be reunited with her daughter later last night.

Reigh was seized after her mother brought her back to the US for a custodial visit and she was last seen with her father in New York on Sunday evening.

Related Articles

It was not immediately clear how Rockefeller and the daughter he had raised as a stay-at-home-father spent the six days after her abduction in Boston or whether he was planning to flee further on the catamaran.

But US investigators are certainly a huge step closer to solving the mystery of Rockefeller's true identity. For not many Americans reach the age of 48 without a driving licence, a social security number, a job or a single penny paid in tax - but the man called himself Clark Rockefeller, when not using a string of other aliases, appeared to have managed just that.

The FBI admitted to being baffled by the lack of a paper trail from his past. "It's like the guy's a ghost," said an officer last week.

Even Miss Boss was apparently not sure who her husband of 12 years really was.

Indeed, several of Rockefeller's acquaintances told The Sunday Telegraph that they sometimes detected a foreign accent beneath his carefully articulated New England tones.

Police have been investigating whether, for all his pretence of American blue blood, he was really British or European. On Friday night, the FBI had released an updated description of the fugitive which strengthened suspicions that he has foreign roots.

"He is reported to speak with an accent that has been described by various individuals as [upper class] Boston Brahmin, European and Scottish sounding," the FBI said. "He also reportedly speaks some Russian."

Earlier yesterday, it was reported that Rockefeller gave up his fight for custody of Reigh in a divorce deal last year with Miss Boss rather than be forced to disclose his true identity.

American authorities had found no trace of Rockefeller's presence in the United States before 1991, when he rented an apartment in New York's Upper East Side

The question marks over Rockefeller's past were nothing new, however, to residents of the small New Hampshire town of Cornish where he and his wife owned a sprawling 15-room house that was home to Reigh for most of her life - or to acquaintances in Boston, three hours' drive away, where he lived for the past nine months.

"He clearly had an affected accent; it sounded British or maybe Canadian," said Kristie Macrakis, a Boston-based academic who knew him from a discussion group called Café Society.

"I always suspected he had British roots, both from his accent and other things," she said. "He also told me he lived in South Africa from the age of five to 10. It was like a parlour game, guessing where he came from and who he was."

Merilynn Bourn, one of the three "Selectmen" who run town affairs in Cornish - population 1,600 - said: "There is no way that Clark is American. He sounded eastern European to me."

Rockefeller had raised his daughter for most of her life but reportedly backed off the battle for custody after Miss Boss, a senior partner with McKinsey & Co, a management consulting firm, raised questions about his identity during the negotiations.

At one stage, he was said to have agreed to produce his birth certificate, but eventually settled for a $1 million (£507,000) payout from his wealthy wife.

It is not known how long Miss Boss had known that her husband was not related to the oil clan, but the information was reported in a local New Hampshire newspaper in 2004, to her annoyance.

In one of his various stories he told about his past, he said he had inherited a vast estate when his parents were killed in a car crash.

He also sometimes told people to call him Michael - the real Michael Clark Rockefeller, the youngest son of Nelson Rockefeller, disappeared on a jungle expedition in Papua New Guinea in 1961, a year after his phoney namesake is believed to have been born.

His paranoia about security and desire for privacy have fuelled the belief that - prior to the dramatic moment when he seized his child - he did not want to risk any scrutiny of his unexplained background.

The Sunday Telegraph has learnt that Rockefeller, who fretted incessantly about his family's safety and once parked fake security cars at the entrance to their Cornish home, built a huge reinforced windowless "bunker" beneath the property, which is now for sale.

"The place looked it like it would have withstood a nuclear bomb," said Alma Gilbert who was shown the house by an estate agent.

Mrs Gilbert, the director of the Cornish Colony Museum, is the veteran of several run-ins with Rockefeller after attempting to include his historical home in a book about the artists and writers who once lived in the town.

Rockefeller unsuccessfully threatened to sue her if she went ahead with the project, saying that the photographs would compromise his family's security as he worked on top secret projects for the ¬Pentagon.

To other residents of Cornish he claimed to be an unpublished writer and a physicist or mathematician working on aerospace projects.

In reality, he spent most of his time there raising Reigh while his wife pursued her career - and role as family breadwinner - in Boston.

The former couple were admired by some in Cornish for helping save the 200-year-old white clapboard Trinity Church with a $110,000 donation. Rockefeller took the credit locally for the ostentatious gift but the money came from a trust controlled by his wife. When he was pictured on the front page of a local newspaper presenting the cheque, he again complained about unwanted publicity.

The town was deeply split about him. "He was eccentric and amusing but clearly untrustworthy," said Janice Orion, a retired London-born teacher and librarian.

"He was a good talker but you could never be sure he was telling the truth. Still, I never thought he'd do anything so stupid.

"Clark never specifically said that he was a member of the family, he just let everyone make the presumption without correcting them."

Rockefeller always stood out from the down-to-earth locals in the sleepy New England community with his peculiar accent, affected mannerisms, extravagant claims and preppy attire.

Even more striking was how he dressed his beloved young daughter in the same "yachtie" uniform of polo shirt, khaki trousers, belt patterned with whales and deck shoes worn without socks, and had her hair cut in a short bob. That habit had prompted the FBI to warn that Rockefeller might have cut Reigh's blonde locks and dressed her like a boy, as well as dying his own thinning hair to help elude detection, although it turned out last night that he had not changed their appearances.

In Cornish, residents also recalled how Rockefeller encouraged his daughter to recite the periodic table of the elements and display her knowledge of French, and her preternatural grasp of long words.

Nobody who saw the two together was in any doubt that he was a devoted, loving and conscientious father. But that is about all they agree on.

"She was a real dog-and-pony show for him," said Miss Bourn. "He wanted her to look like him and he wanted her to look good so he'd look good.

"He clearly loved her, but it was a self-absorbed and narcissistic love. He was very controlling about everything in his life and that includes his daughter."

But a close friend of Rockefeller told The Sunday Telegraph that he was devastated when his former wife won sole custody of Reigh and moved to London with her.

"He adored that child and often said he missed her so very much," the friend said.

"I never thought he would go to these extremes but I'm absolutely sure that Reigh has been safe with him.

"She was raised by him for her first five or six years and they were together every day. To lose that relationship was devastating for him."

Since the carefully planned abduction, aided by two paid drivers who were duped into helping the pair reach New York, there were reported sightings of Rockefeller and Reigh from Delaware to the Turks and Caicos islands.

Curiously, no public record has been found of Miss Boss' wedding to Rockefeller - supposedly a low-key affair on Nantucket in 1995. He is said to have recently confided to Prof Macrakis that there had never been an official ceremony.

Rockefeller carried himself like an aristocrat and portrayed himself as a major art collector with supposed originals by the likes of Rothko and Mondrian hanging on his walls.

Both a New York gallery owner and an artist who saw the works said last week that they appeared genuine, although their authenticity must now be in serious doubt.

"I finally stopped returning his calls because I realised he was wasting my time," said the gallery owner.

He had first appeared in Miss Boss's life around 1993 when she was working as a Wall Street intern for the financial firm Merrill Lynch. He was living in a posh New York apartment near Dag Hammarskjold Plaza, an indication of some money behind him.

The couple later married on the island of Nantucket off the Massachusetts coast, although no marriage licence or wedding announcement can be found. Nor is there a record of the lease on the island home where they lived from November 1999 to July 2001,

What is clear is that not one piece of property has ever been in Rockefeller's name. The pair's home in Cornish and their $2.9 million brownstone house on Pinckney Street, just around the corner from Senator John Kerry on Boston's trendy Beacon Hill, were both held in trust funds controlled by his wife.

Even Miss Boss, a graduate of Stanford University and Harvard Business School, appears guarded. Records show she lists a Boston post office box on all public paperwork, and has used similar mail pick up points in New Hampshire and New York.

Her behaviour last week also raised some eyebrows. Unlike most mothers in abducted child cases, she made no public appearances and answered no questions, waiting until Thursday to release a video appeal for Reigh's return.

She was comforted in Boston by her twin sister, Julia Anne, who lives in Washington. In another strange twist, the New York Post reported that Rockefeller had initially pursued Julia Anne and only transferred his romantic attentions to Sandra when his first advances were thwarted.

According to reports last week, Miss Boss recently paid Rockefeller the final instalment of the $1 million divorce settlement.

In a bitter irony, police say that under the name Clark Rock he used $300,000 of that to buy gold coins - easily transferable and difficult to trace - to go on the run with his daughter. That gold was ultimately of no use to him.